'Sleep No More' - an anniversary experience in New York

Its our 4th wedding anniversary, and we saw 'Sleep no More', as Vartika had blocked tickets and wanted to see it since a long time.

It's a unique experience. You got to seek the characters, scenes, and the story yourself. No commentary, no prodding, no guideline, no sequence to help you. Initially surprising, you start to figure out what's going on. The acting is highly intense, rooms quite gloomy with dim lights and classical music playing, ghost masks on each audience member surrounding the actors. Created a haunted aura but not scary. It was psychologically intense, storing up emotions, shocks, pity, sadness, empathy, envy, lust and others on your mind. Whilst this is going on, you also need to run up and down the stairs (5 floors with hundreds of rooms) and seek where the actor is going next and who are they going to interact with. Some scenes when all of them come together - ballroom dance, dinner, orgy, blood bath is when all audience come together and you see crowd of ghosts staring at all actors and absorbing their mime and movements. The ruthless nature of murders and orgy, dry faces and evil looks, in your face nudity and sex scenes stir your mind quite a bit while creating a lasting impression. 

Working in Analytics and Visualization, this sense of Immersive Storytelling experience was something I could totally relate to. This is what I sell to clients go change the nature of Collaborative decision-making via group discussions, issue discovery, co-investigation and resolutions with your own understanding. Everyone in the audience can theoretically gain a different, new yet completely right insight through their own path.

Another exciting part was that if you stared into an actor's eyes, they would hold your hand and take you to a closed room alone where you experience their acting in person, alone and different. I saw 5 people in different scenes experiencing this. The last 2 were escorted at the end of the play go to bar on 2nd floor where they kissed passionately and left smiling.

I had gone into it without an iota of knowledge and hence it hit me very hard. People who had read or seen reviews before hand may not have been as surprised.

Quite different from the static, fixed play where someone is taking you through the play with a predefined commentary, scene sequence, practiced and times scenes and interactions.

It was a beautiful experience, such as life itself- while your paths are different and decided by you, the destination is something you can decide, and the journey itself will be the exciting artful experience that is most important irrespective of the outcome. Salud!

x

A Mathematician's Apology

A very surprising titled book, by Mr. Hardy, confesses his life, his subject, and his group's inevitable way of life and viewpoints. Sarcastically, it may seem, it is a very heartily written essay, and sheds new light on what precision means.

Some of his ideas mix up with philosophy and make a stronger point than the latter. There is but an issue to be tackled. There is an inclination to believe from the essay, that philosophy is a lighter subject, lacking logic, which gives rise to many theories, and all of them being 'right' simultaneously. There are too many words being used to describe a concept/feeling. A whole book written which can be summarized in a paragraph. :)
While, Mathematics is purely, uniquely, and ubiquitously Right. There cannot be an ambiguity. Its is Exact. It doesn't use more than is required.

The reasons of pursuit of Maths is purely because of simple choices life presents. There is no higher purpose than others' occupations. He clearly states the reasons of a man's work, viz.:
1. Investigation of the Truth.
2. Professional Pride.
3. Ambition.

Everything else is derived from one or the combination of these. Any social Service for that matter is not because you want to do good to humanity, but rather you want to find the real reasons for the inequality, and your inner ambition is appreciation of yourself and satisfying your ego, at some level, be it in public, or with yourself when you are alone, justifying your good nature.

Another Statement which hits you is : 'There are very few people in this planet who can do one work extremely well, there are even fewer people who can do many things well, and there is probably no one who can do exactly two things nicely'.

He doesn't justify the mathematicians way of living, alone, pondering in a room, immersed in the same old book/paper for days on end. Though he does glorify the intellectual greatness that mathematicians HAVE to possess to continue with their careers. The aeshetics of Maths, is brought out in the light. Maths can't be felt by anyone, but a select few, and these people are doomed to life, and can't do anything else for good. Also, pure maths, which we are dealing with is unreal for the real world, it is not for Application, it is too pure to be applied to the real world. Too Succinct without any approximations of Engineers who kill the beauty.

It is humble, and proud at the same instant, flirts with the line of being sarcastic, but then its a mathematicians' work, it is as accurate as it can get, and laymen like me are unable to comprehend exactly what he means to describe.

The White Tiger

Adiga - Not so much a hero, but anyways, a star

I registered a lot of negative responses about the book winning the Booker Prize, which is why I felt like reviewing the book.

The day I read about the book in the Times, as he had described it, I just wanted to read the book then and there. The next time I was at a book sellor, I bought the copy (pirated) and started on my journey.
I enjoyed it. I wouldn't dare say that the book was as good to be a prize winner. Anyways, I would like you to go a little deeper than it seems. The book doesn't offer a literary delight, or subtlety in any manner whatsoever. It is supposed to be crude. The flow cannot be uniform with other aspirations.

There are very few characters in the book. And majority of them are typical. The only significant one is the villager, his attitude, and his language is potrayed with as transparency and astuteness as possible. Its about how he's stuck within his family ties, and their traditions, serving the urban lifegiver. The concept of the Rooster Coup is nicely expressed, through the story.

Every Indian doesn't go through the deals the driver went through. Some percentage do. And those percentage may/may not think in that fashion. However, the anguish and the breakdown is perfectly justified. And in this manner, rather, the entrepreneurship has been defined and imbibed into the character. Also, there were quite few tinges of the reporter in the narration.
The light hearted ness of the whole episode in the end is nicely done, it almost feels like an anti-climax.

I loved the book the day I read it, but as I thought over it, within a week I was not so much in admiration with the book. There is nothing more than the story, the truths about the strangled desires, and the inability to be able to unshackle them and how even such a thought would be criminal. But then, I think the potrayal of such a feeling to people outside, who can't imagine how the plight of a 'low' class individual without any honour whatsoever is. The whole concept of freedom is given a new expression. It reminds me of 1984 in an non-obvious way.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Quarter -1

So Am in the middle of Unbearable Lightness Of Being. Milan Kundera. Czech Setting. Till now, it has revolved around infidelity, and meaning of decision making. It has tinges of some revolution (I have little idea of Czech History, which leads to my ignorance in regards to the setting), some music detours, usage and explanations of colloquial phrases and a deeper and personal understanding of them in context of the story. The Consciousness is taken in a very binary fashion, the concept of lightness and heaviness, both becoming burdens eventually, is tackled very delicately. As in, it has been revisited at regular intervals of time, but the author doesn't force his thoughts, he recreates the perplex his mind abodes in.

I had read the Laughable Loves by the same author, and had found it to be pretty interesting, wierd but interesting.

Sexuality is handled very intricately, on the verge of wierdness. The politics involved, and the various insecurities. The lead character assumes a certain superiority, which is difficult for me to accept. The whole Czech society is difficult to understand. Maybe its because of the history, the revolution, the whole situation that the people behave this way.

There are peculiar interpretatons of the love he develops, at a very deep level of consciousness.
He doesn't try to justify it. He tries to find its meaning. The possibilities, the biases, the whole clarity he develops is believable.

It has other peculiar paragraphs.
For Example, a particular paragraph I liked:

'She shot roll after roll and gave them to foriegn Journalists (). Many of her photographs turned up in the Western Press. They were pictures of tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with bloodstained red white and blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles racing full speed around the tanks and waving Czech flags on long staffs, of young girls in unbelievably short skirts provoking the miserably sexually famished Russian Soldiers by kissing random passersby before their eyes. As I have said before, the Russian Invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious and no longer explicable euphoria. '

It sums up so much in so less words.

Anyways, I think I will add to this as I proceed along. I really like the book till now.